Re: SB6141 Firmware Update?

I personally would still say 5 times is way too much, it should be 0.In my case, I have saved spreadsheets of timeouts/disconnects from mid-October. Back then it was 1-2 a day if that. We've had RR for 11 years and have never had any issues that persisted so long.

In December it has been a lot worse, but it seems to vary day to day. In the past 3 weeks I've had an instance where I went 2 days with no disconnects/reboots. And then another instance of 1.5 days with no reboots/disconnects. But then there have been days when I got upwards of 15-20.

When the field tech comes out next week to my place, I am going to stress that I don't think it is anything with our coax/house and I will quote the tier 3 tech on saying that he didn't believe it was within the house either. When I questioned the tier 3 tech why even have a field tech come out, he said just to "cover all bases". One of my fears is that he'll say I need all new coax or a new cable modem. I truly believe it is nothing within the house. I've had virtually 0 issues in 11 years and nothing from a coax or modem/hardware location has changed within the house (except that I have now purchased a new modem because of this issue).

Again, please keep us updated. I am sure there are a few of us who share your frustration

Well, here's a new little wrinkle. Since the tech was out here on Wednesday, things have been pretty good, but I've noticed a pattern. Every six hours I'm dropping connection once or twice. Here's my latest round of disconnects.

1/3/13AM9:08 - 9:119:21 - 9:22

PM2:55 - 2:573:03 - 3:049:46 - 9:47

1/4/13AM3:04 - 3:053:14 - 3:159:08 - 9:099:13 - 9:14

Great huh? My power levels are really getting near the borders of acceptable signals, close to +14 downstream and +31 upstream. I'm calling in again, but unless the tech shows up right at 3 or 9 and can see the disconnects happening they're going to shrug and say they have no idea.

Edit: Just talked to Tier 3 support again. Truck 4 is on it's way tomorrow AM. This is just getting stupid. I swear, if I had any viable option to switch to another ISP I'd be all over it.

Does tier 3 ever mention the possibility that it could be something beyond your house/drop? Like a misconfiguration on their end? Do you know if your "neighborhood node" maintenance ever happened? If you go to the RR network status page, do you see anything scheduled around you residence? (»help.rr.com/AA/rrwho.aspx?Return ··· tus.aspx)

Although now, like you said, your levels are super borderline out of spec so I would think that would be the first thing the field tech focuses on.

With each dropout do you still receive the same errors as in earlier in the thread? The T3 timeouts, failed to communicate on upstream, etc?

I just had a dropout myself, right in the middle of doing some work.Here is a combination of two log files I've saved so far today. I notice I get two scenarios - both result in loss of connection. Sometimes I get the T4 timeout which logs a full modem reboot, resets modem uptime, etc. Sometimes I'll just get the "16 consecutive T3 timeouts" - still lose service and modem lights will cycle - but no legit modem reboot and uptime remains the same. My upstream signal level is around 48-50 and downstream -6 (tier 3 said that is fine, but I have had this modem on several different configurations where upstream wasn't as hot - still had same problems).

Surprisingly I haven't had a drop in almost 12 hours and I still have a tech coming tomorrow morning. Downstream levels have been in the 9-10 dBmV, which is better, but still not great, and upstream is still sitting just about 31 dBmV.

As for the errors, yes, the exact same pattern. I'll first get these two error messages.

Sometimes some of those messages will pop up individually without reconnects, but the MIMO event message only shows when the modem reconnects.

As for the tier 3 guys and a neighborhood problem. Yes and no. Depends on who I talked to. I've probably talked to over 15 different people at this point including 3 techs at my house and 3 different 'Tier 3' support techs. 4 or 5 of them believed there was a problem with something in the neighborhood, but then again, 4 or 5 of them thought it was my modem. I really don't think these guys communicate very well, and one tech will 'discover' something, and the next person you talk to has no idea what your talking about. Some of the techs are amazed that other techs didn't test or see what they're seeing, other guys have no idea.

It's getting to point where I know more about what I should be seeing and what's going on than most of the support folks I'm talking to. I know what's wrong, I just can't fix it... :)

I honestly think that I can use the Motorola and bring the Arris back if they ever fix whatever this underlying issue is, but at this point I don't want to give them anything they can try to blame that isn't theirs.

Tech just left, but I don't really think much was accomplished. Of course, I haven't had a disconnect in almost 24 hours, which is great, but I don't know if there's any reason for that or I've just been lucky.

No one can tell me whether or not maintenance has been out in my neighborhood and done any work, and I was still seeing high power levels, but things seem to be working.

When the tech showed up (another new guy, that's 4 new guys in 4 visits), I walked through the whole situation once again (don't these guys document anything?) I might have been talking over this guys head because he's nodding and says, "Yeah, I think I had a call in your neighborhood a week ago, a guy had good signal levels, but was getting I3 and I4 timeouts." So I say, "You mean T3 and T4?" And he nods, "Yeah those." Oi...

He checked the lines, and of course they were fine other than the signal being high. The only thing he did was swap out the one splitter I had left, a Commscope SV-V2G that knocked each output down 3.5 dB's with a Commscope SVD-C6G that knocked down one output 1.2 dB's (fed to the intelligent home Ubee modem) and the other down 6 dB's (fed to the Arris internet service modem). Power levels on the Arris are now 7-9 dBmV across the 4 downstream channels and 34.75 dBmV on the one upstream channel.

Unfortunately, there's little for me to do but wait and see what happens. The Tier 3 guy I spoke to last night might have hit the nail on the head when he told me, "Lot of times the guys coming out just keep swapping out stuff until things work, but we never figure out what the problem actually was." I'm pretty sure that's what's happened in my case. I did ask the tech that was here if he had any other modems on the truck, and all he had was the same Arris model I had.

So at this point, I'll give it a few days and if I don't see any issues, I'm going to throw the Motorola back online and see if it works. I doubt it though since I'm out of range of the power levels Motorola told me were best for the SB6141.

Well, just got off the phone with these guys again. Got transferred up to Level 3 support. He said he was seeing 'very high' Rx levels and that they were all over the place. That could be caused by the weather, but they should be able to fix that.

Of course, they have to send another tech out, and the next available appointment is Monday at 11 AM. And that's probably just for them to come out and say, "Yeah, they look high, I have to put in a Maintenance ticket."

That is ridiculous, exactly the type of cycle I am hoping to avoid, but seems inevitable.

Does tier 3 ever make mention of escalating the issue up to a "network engineer" or anything? The one tier 3 guy I spoke to mentioned this, but he said he had to witness/have proof of my connection dropping and another house in the neighborhood dropping before he could escalate it as an "area issue" for a network engineer. All the customer service reps, two tier 3 guys, and one field tech have all said my signal levels look fine, well within spec.

As you've stated, the intermittent nature of this problem doesn't help the troubleshooting process at all. My connection has been flawless since 11:08PM last night, up until an hour ago. I've had 2 disconnects in the last hour.

I'm playing the waiting game until Wednesday when the field tech comes. I am very doubtful that he will find anything wrong inside the house. I am going to stress that the tier 3 guy said he didn't think it was anything inside the house and that he scheduled the truck roll "just to cover all bases". The tier 3 guy said he made notes for what the field tech should test for, hopefully that is true.

I also called the national support # last night to see if they had any "monitoring results" from what the tier 3 guy setup on Dec. 30th. The national helpdesk person said he could only see 24 hours worth of monitoring data. I then asked if "name" from tier 3 made any notes on my account and he said the only thing it showed was that he scheduled a truck roll. I'm hoping there are some notes, somewhere on my account, that this tier 3 guy wrote since he witnessed 2 timeouts while I was on the phone with him. Probably not, and it will be like starting fresh the next time I talk to someone.

I'm 99% certain I will be calling support Friday after the field tech visit on Wednesday. Hopefully I can get to tier 3 relatively easily. On the RR network status page for my area there is a "planned event" on Thursday about 4-5 blocks away from my residence that says: " ... CUTTING OVER COAX AFFECTING NODE ... " and then lists some sort of node ID and a specific house address. This probably doesn't mean anything and will have no affect on my connection, but I've resorted to putting all my hope of getting this issue fixed into 'events' like these.